As Siobhan Garrigan, who studies English at the University of Lincoln,
puts it: "Young people don't want to identify as feminists because there
is this man-hating, frumpy, lesbian image forced on us."

You
must have heard about those accusations many, many times before! I
certainly have. I'm gorgeous, lurve men (especially with pesto and
garlic) and, sadly, fail to be anything but quite heterosexual. Well
OK. I'm not gorgeous. But I certainly am not frumpy! The gall, she
mutters.

All joking aside, those three accusations
don't have anything to do with each other. The first one states that
anyone wanting gender equality must hate men. That's pretty weird. The
second one argues, that women who want gender equality cannot be
attractive enough to get men in a system where women are second-class
citizens. Only unattractive women would want equality!

That's
illogical, too. Finally, one's sexuality has nothing to do with one's
desire for a gender-equal society. All illogical, says Echidne.

But
squint your eyes a bit, and you see the underlying pattern, what all
three of these things share: These women do not try to please men. Or
that's the suspicion of anyone using those accusations. Wanting
equality means not wanting to please men. Therefore, women who want
equality must hate men, be unattractive or prefer women in their
sexuality.

Now, I don't accept those accusations. I'm
also willing to admit that there have been feminists who hate men (but
nowhere near the numbers of MRA guys who hate women), that all social
justice movements have more or less frumpy people of both sexes in them
and so on. But no other social justice movement is taken to task for
anything similar. No other social justice movement needs to say "but of
course we love you, other guys!" or try to make sure that their members
are nicely made-up and properly behaved. It's only demanded of
feminism, and that, I suspect, is because of women's traditional roles
and traditional gender stereotypes.

Besides, the sexes
are not independent of each other, and statements which ostracize
feminism have a powerful impact because of that. Nobody wants to be
shunned by the groups of their peers, after all.

Second Class of Arguments

This crops up quite a bit in the comments. In the more sophisticated form it's a criticism of feminism as a political movement without intersectionality. In
the rougher forms the argument is about rich women perhaps being
slightly worse off than rich men but who cares? As one commentator
states, how do poor women get helped if some women become judges or
famous television personalities? Her life remains the same.

From
the latter angle feminism is unimportant because it is seen as a
movement which only focuses on wealthy, educated, white women who are
better off than, say, poor, uneducated, black men. Or poor women of any
race.

Here I want to draw a distinction between
feminism as-a-political-movement and feminism-as-a-theory. The two are
different, I've come to believe, and while intersectionality is
important in both fields, the idea that focusing on gender in isolation
isn't useful for anyone but the top women in the society is misplaced
when it comes to theory.

It helps to understand how
gender plays a role in the hierarchical ladders. One possible way that
game might go is that women are slightly worse off than men who are
otherwise the same in the kinds of things which determine the rung of
the ladder we inhabit. If that's the case, then poor women could be
slightly worse off than poor men, for instance.

Or
perhaps not. The question is ultimately an empirical one and the
studies must be done separately for each society. But that has been the
traditional setting when it comes to comparing men and women and it is
probably still valid in most countries of this world.

Beliefs
about the proper roles of men and women and beliefs about women's worth
have an impact on all members of the society, including its women.
Seeing powerful women performing well in areas which have not
traditionally allowed women that chance can change stereotypes and
sexist beliefs. In that sense what happens at the very top of the
society does matter to all women and men.

Those who
argue that the problems with sexism otherwise privileged women have
don't matter fail to understand that similar and worse problems affect
women further down the ladders. Not studying those problems will hurt
all women, ultimately.

I'm not sure how clear I have
been. There's a difference between intersectionality and between the
argument that feminism should be a social justice movement which
supports every cause and all people.

Intersectionality
plays a useful and important role. Turning feminism into some kind of a
general social justice movement would leave the question of gender
unexamined. Other social justice movements are unlikely to take up the
slack.

This class of arguments also fails to appreciate that much feminist writing IS about intersectionality.

And
to argue that some different cause (such as income inequality) is more
important than feminism is to fail to take into account the
intersectionality in that place. It also assumes that we must pick one
cause and focus on that alone. I don't know about you but I can run and
chew gum and plan my next blog post all at the same time.

Third Class of Arguments
These are the arguments that it is the men who are worse off in Western
societies. Feminists are accused of not working to reduce the rates of
male-on-male violence, including the rates of male suicide, or of not
trying for the most dangerous jobs in equal numbers or of not working to
get more fathers child custody in the case of a divorce.

Yet
a very consistent tone in the orchestra that is feminist music has
always focused on the evils that traditional gender roles can cause. A
few examples:

Mothers are more likely to get custody
in the case of a divorce when the society believes that mothers should
do the hands-on care of the children. Stay-at-home parents are more
likely to get custody than the family breadwinners, and the vast
majority of stay-at-home parents are women. (It's a completely
different question whether fathers, indeed, are treated especially
unfairly in custody courts. Evidence suggests that in most cases the
divorcing parents agree on who should have custody and when this is not
the case, fathers win at least one half of all the cases in the US.)

Traditional
definitions of masculinity have sometimes glorified violence. To the
extent that feminism has opposed such definitions, it has also opposed
one of the many causes for male-on-male violence.

The
most dangerous traditionally male jobs do not always welcome women with
open arms. Sexual harassment can be used as a way to defend one's
turf. It's important to note that women don't necessarily make a simple
choice not to become, say, firefighters. Also, as I've mentioned
before, prostitution is probably the occupation with the highest risk of
violent death, and it is a female-dominated occupation. But because it
is often an illegal one, its riskiness does not enter occupational
safety statistics.

It's a
damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't argument. Feminists should work
hard on men's liberation because women have more "choices" than men do.
But when feminists do suggest that men should be able to become
stay-at-home-parents or that men should be encouraged to react to anger
in ways other than violence, they become interfering bitches who disobey
biological imperatives and so on. It's hard for me to know what some
of these extremist MRA people want, because on the one hand they want
feminists to work for the liberation of men and on the other hand they
want the old-time gender roles to come back and feminists to shut up.

The
best way to address these issues (in addition to getting the actual
facts about them) is by pointing out that feminism wants equal
opportunities by gender and equal valuation of traditionally male and
female spheres of activity. Feminists who encourage women to take up
the bread-winning role or who encourage women to become firefighters or
police officers should please these types of MRA people, right? Because
that way more women will die in the dangerous jobs and more men will be
SAHDs and then get custody in the case of a divorce. Well, that last
sentence is only half-serious. The point is that much of feminist
agenda IS giving men more choices, should they want them.

Perhaps
one could also mention that violence IS studied a lot in the society,
and much of that study is about male-on-male violence. It's hard to see
what input the feminist movement with its meager funds could contribute
to what is already being done.

I have trouble with
this group of argument because it veers from one end to the other. At
one extreme, the argument is that the most traditional gender norms were
the correct ones. At the other extreme, feminists should work to
liberate men whom those traditional gender norms have enslaved.

Fourth Class of Arguments
This is another familiar one: The feminist movement was needed in the
past (and perhaps still is, in places like Saudi Arabia) but women in
the Western countries are now completely equal with men.

What
makes the argument familiar is that people wrote about it earnestly in
the late nineteenth century and then again in the 1930s and so on and so
on. Makes you think, doesn't it?

Women in the West
are certainly much better off now than, say, a hundred years ago. We
can vote, for one thing. But the Church of England still won't have
female bishops, the Catholic Church is an all-boys-club and so is
Islam. The number of women in the parliaments of most countries is
nowhere near 50%, sexual violence is still a problem and, most
importantly, misogyny still manages to exist.

I'm
grateful for the changes past generations of feminists spent their lives
bringing about. Very grateful. But I don't think the job is over and
done with. Whenever I feel like that, I go cruising on the net and get
my head put right again. All it takes is participation in some poorly
moderated forum while using a female-sounding pen-name. Or reading
YouTube comments...

And as long as we are not affecting the gender roles at home we will not see ultimate gender equality in the wider society.

Conclusion

To
conclude, let me state that, yes, some aspects of feminism have gone
astray in the past, and, yes, there are always ways to make the social
justice movement that is feminism more inclusive and more effective and
fairer. At the same time, the feminism of the past got women the vote,
fairer laws and fairer retirement benefits. It got women access to
schools and colleges and jobs. It got women mentioned in the history
books. It got women their own bank accounts and the right to enter
contracts. It cast light on the once-common belief that rape is a
shame for the victim and better kept hidden.

And today? We discuss how dirty a word "feminism" might be.

The
paradox of my kind of feminism is this: The problems of sexism have
been fixed when each individual is judged as an individual, not as a
representative of a whole gender. Yet the only way to see the
sexist treatment of any one individual is by looking at how it is
affected by the beliefs and prejudices and societal practices which
apply to one's whole gender.

That's what I have tried to do on this blog, over the years (send money!). It may not be the kind of feminism this Guardian
article or the comments attached to it discuss. It may not even be
feminism, who knows, and it may have very limited value. But from my
snake's-eye-viewpoint most of the arguments classes I amassed miss the
point of feminism, and it really is to remove that ankle-cuff with your
sex etched on it. So that we can all run free or something.

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